Industrial process control and automation systems, including direct current (DC) powered control systems, are often used to automate large and complex industrial processes. These types of systems routinely include sensors, actuators, and controllers. The controllers typically receive measurements from the sensors and generate control signals for the actuators.
A ground fault in a DC-powered control system that is connected to many field devices installed over long distances from a controller can affect statuses read from input field devices and can affect statuses of output field devices. This effect is independent of the ground fault detection principle used. Standards and customer requirements often dictate that ground faults should be detected but should have no effect on the state of a process under control. Existing ground fault detection solutions often permanently affect the state of the process under control or are not capable of correlating input state changes with ground faults being detected.